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We got to open for a few hours tonight, when the winds were only 30 mph:

[Update at the end of the night]: Winds eventually came back down, and we got another 4 or 5 hours of science done. Hurray!

So instead of talking about the wind, let’s talk about our latest PhD*:
Vanessa Bailey, first discover-er of a new planet using MagAO, has successfully defended her PhD dissertation today in Arizona! Here is HD 106906 b discovered by Vanessa using Clio:

Since so many of her friends and colleagues around the world wanted to watch it, she and Amali Vaz set up remote streaming of the talk. Her dissertation is titled: “Adaptive Optics for Directly Imaging Planetary Systems”, and Jared and I woke up in the middle of the day to watch it:

And here’s the video:

It looks like there was much rejoicing in Tucson:

Quote:
Jared: That’s a lot of pictures of Vanessa, especially since she refuses to come on MagAO runs lately (even if she does help remotely).

Here’s the song of the day for Dr. Vanessa P. Bailey:

Cover:

Note that Vanessa is the 2nd graduate of Brookings High School, South Dakota to earn a PhD from the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy using (in part) MagAO images of exoplanets. Article from the Brookings Register:

*Pending submitting her revisions 🙂

“Maria makes the mountains sound like folks were up there dyin'”

We’ve already used up some of the best wind songs, and we’re just getting started. I saw at least one gust of 64 mph on our wind gage up here at Clay. The LCO weather page doesn’t go that high:

Down at the 100″ DuPont telescope, they were getting hammered by high 60s (mph) for hours. We still haven’t reached the MagAO record. Maybe tomorrow.

I made this recording in the dome tonight while winds were over 50 (it’s not your computer, the lights were off).

OK, I’ve had enough winter. Look at all these clouds!

And the winds, and still the clouds!

So we didn’t even open tonight, at all, ever.

Well, at least that meant it was a good time to fix Clio. So I’ve been aligning the camera by hand lately, but not anymore!

Here was us last week… Pato Pinto helped us by soldering a jumper to bypass the broken motor so that we could move the other ones with the gui from the warmth of the control room, and only had to go out to the platform to move the field stop:

Thanks to Jenny Greene who delivered the necessary tools to us today, Jared and I went out to the cold platform tonight to tear into Clio once more. We replaced the broken motor controller with a working one, including setting up the dip switches and adding thermal paste:

Before and after:

So … now it works!

Good night!

Song of the day:

Taylor Swift liked this song so much she did 2 covers — here’s a few people who followed suit:

It was clear tonight, which was nice after last night. But seeing was pretty bad (for LCO), and the winds kicked up again. We’ve had a few days respite from these winter gusts coming from the NE, but now we are again huddling with our back to them, pointing to the SW.

This seems appropriate.

Today was T.J.’s first night, which means the start of good solid breaks for Jared and me. It was pretty cloudy which made for a quiet night with no disturbances:

Since it was my first break in a long time, my brain was mainly up for a lot of youtubing of Namibian folk songs. If you are also spending your weekend waiting for the clouds to clear, enjoy this long playlist of beautiful music from Namibia:

First song of the day:
!Nosa !Oes Ge Nesa /translated “It’s a quiet night there are no disturbances”

Cover:

(Also stick around for the fun song “Sponono” at the end, I love that one!)

The person who posted this to Youtube claims it is also called Sponono, but it’s not the one (above) that I know as Sponono. It’s still a nice one. Perhaps our Nama-speaking readers can help us with the title of this one:

Third song of the day:
Tuaza Kokure

No covers to be found, and I listed long and hard — I love this one. The second song in the Tuaza Kokure video is a cover for the…

…Fourth song of the day:
Dumelang ma Africa

Fifth song of the day:
Tate Wetu

Update: Covers are required if they can be found:

Sixth song of the day:

I don’t remember how to spell the title so I couldn’t find a cover — but I love this one.

Seventh song of the day:
Sipiri

Cover according to the 2015A Blog Rules:

Final song of the day — also no covers:
#Nabara #Na

A beautiful peaceful one to end on. Love the language and the singing. Good night!